Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Coffee Shop as Still Life

For the third time, I’m re-reading Judy Martin’s Mastering Sketching, and in one
paragraph that I was reading over breakfast, she mentioned the types of subject
matter most popular with painters and sketchers: landscapes,
portraits, figures, still lifes, nature, interiors, etc. When I sketch in
coffee shops, I tend to think of the subject matter as a combination of life
drawing (figures and portraits) and interiors. But this afternoon at Zoka, fueled
by a particularly delicious eggnog latte, it suddenly occurred to me that what
I’m really sketching is a large still life.

People are more interesting to me than apples, flowers or water
pitchers, but the people in coffee shops move so little that I can sketch them almost
like still life compositions. And like sketching a still life, the challenge is
in showing the varying light values, expressing the relationships among the
objects and giving the objects life.

The main difference with my large still life is that the flowers
are already arranged for me, and sometimes the apples get up and leave.